There are many ways that we perceive the world and the people in it. Perception is the way we see our world and is the basis of how we react to the reality we make of it. Our perception of others can also change the way we communicate we people. It is important that we realize that our perception of others are most of the time are not going to be 100% accurate. For this paper I was ask to change one aspect of myself for a day and write about how other people perceive me differently. I thought about a lot about things that I could possible change to see if people would have a different perception about me.
Most of them that I thought of would probably result in little to no results. I then realized that if I were to be more talkative and more social that would the most reaction from other people because I’m naturally shy and a reserved person. In this paper I will be sharing the experience of how I changed from being a shy and reserved person to a talkative and social person. I will also share what people reaction and what I believe how their perception of me changed.
When I first made the change to be more talkative it was hard to break the old habit of being quiet and minding my own business. I had to be constantly thinking that I need to be social and start to talk to other people. I remember the first couple of people I started to talk to it was hard for me to find topics to talk about since I general am not the person who initiates conversation with people that I have never meet. I noticed that if I didn’t know what I wanted to say to them and had frequent pauses they were most likely to give short answers and often not have a follow up question for me to continue the conversation.
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So basically from what I perceived is that when a conversation is awkward and if it is with a person that you have meet for the very first time, most everyone will try to end the conversation as quickly as possible. After those first couple of awkward conversion I had with those people, I realized that I had to have a variety of topics that I was willing talk to them about without making weird pauses. As for myself after those awkward conversation I felt my self confidence in meeting and communicating with new people took a hit for the worst. I remember feeling really hot and also that my face was turning a bright red from the embarrassing first couple attempts in communicating with those people.
In connection of awkward speech I found an academic article about how people perceive conversation as awkward through how the a person speaks and what words they use while communicating. The article is titled Detecting friendly, flirtatious, awkward and assertive speech in speed dating. It was written by Ranganath, Rajesh and his colleagues who are from the University of Stanford. They are from the Stanford department of Computer Science and Linguistics. They did a study about how people can come to conclusion whether a person can come off as flirtatious, friendly, awkward or assertive by auditory cues and a person use of words during the conversation.
They did this by conducting a speed dating activity and ask each participant how they rated their date on being friendly, flirtatious, awkward and assertive. The people who were rated on being awkward used words that seperate themselves from past events or ideas. For example its common for them to say “I mean” or they would use less first-person pronouns. They also were most like use indecisive words like: maybe, kind of and sort of (Ranganath, 2013, Pg.111). Looking back on those first couple of awkward conversion I had at the start of the day I did most of the things that were categorized as awkward. So through those two experience I knew I had to better.
After those two awkward conversion at the beginning of my day that I change from being shy to talkative, I felt like I need to be more prepared to start conversations and not be awkward. The next conversations I had went very well compared to the awkward conversations. I noticed that there were many differences between the this conversation and the ones that went bad. The first thing I noticed is the eye contact in the first 30 seconds of meeting a person is super important in setting the tone of how well the conversation goes.
As a person who in general a shy person I realize that this is one thing that I struggle with when I am meeting new people. But when I was being more social and talks towards everyone I felt empowered and a sense of I could do no wrong. It was interesting having these feels because I felt like people notice me more when I was being more social wich I generally hate being a center of attention. My friends also noticed really quick that something changed about me and at first they would looking at me funny like something was wrong with me. But as the day continued they got use to me being more talkative.
When I went to work after school I noticed that customers were a lot more nice to me since I was talking to them and getting to know them. My coworkers notice this and started to act differently than usual at work. They were more optimistic about the day and other things, before they were always negative about work and dealing with customers. I think it is safe to say that me being more talkative change a lot people’s perception about me. It also change my perspective on why some people like to be social.
After doing this experiment for a day it has change a some of my views on how people perceive me as a person. I am amazed how quickly people’s perception can change by just changing an aspect of yourself in a major way. I was also surprised that my perception of other people change while changing from being shy to being social. I have come to the conclusion the people’s perception are changeable although it may need something drastic changes like what I did. I also learned that changing a part of your personality can also change your perception on how you view people. Overall I think this experiment was a great way to show how perception affects how we see the world and communicate with others.
References
- How Perception Influences the Communication Process – Verywell Mind
- The Role of Perception in Communication and Decision Making – National Institutes of Health
- How Does Your Personal Perception Affect Your Other Senses? – The New York Times Learning Network
- How Perception Influences Software Design – Lifewire
- How People Change Their Perception of Time in Daily Life – MondeStuff
- Perception Explanation – University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing
